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“No government has the might to control an entire population … When scattered titters swell into a chorus of hilarity like a nuclear chain reaction, people are acknowledging that they have all noticed the same infirmity in an exalted target. A lone insulter would have risked the reprisals of the target, but a mob of them, unambiguously in cahoots in recognising the target’s foibles, is safe.”
But why do humans laugh? As it was mentioned in Humour and laughter, many theories of humour have been developed throughout history. However, observing these theories with the help of Bergson optics, I began to notice that each of the theories remind of a certain mechanism. For example,
scales
untied deflating balloon
untied
Delving into this theory, it turns out that laughter itself is a very mechanical action (as, incidentally, Bergson wrote). laughter is reversal: as Knight writes: “when we smile, we stretch out the corners of our mouth and show our teeth”, moreover the joke also unfolds itself, the act of laughter flares up and spreads, gets more and more intense, and “leaves us peculiarly helpless and vulnerable” (Knight, 2019).
Another observation that confirms the relationship between mechanical in humans and human in mechanical is “when we find something funny, it’s often because of some incongruity between mind and body, the ideal and the real” (Knight, 2019). Only something truly human causes laughter, when we find animals or nature funny, we project some human properties onto them. Moreover, the real cause of laughter is hidden into the body, not the mind.
Quoting Bergson,
“The hero in a tragedy does not eat or drink or warm himself. He does not even sit down any more than can be helped. To sit down in the middle of a fine speech would imply that you remembered you had a body” (Bergson, 1921: 52).
So can we truly say that what causes laughter is something that resembles us of humans? And if the mechanism is funny it is mostly because its mechanical becomes too humanlike?
I will try to answer these questions by showing some examples of Digital Media artworks and combining them with how theories of laughter work, as well as comparing them to the mechanisms of the human body.Laughter as a mechanism Chris Knight (2019) in the essay Did laughter make the mind? refers to laughter